7 trends in recruitment and selection

Finding and selecting the best people for your organisation is still the most important HR intervention. In many organisations the hr practices in recruitment and selection are still of the Stone Age. Someone has found a new job or gets an internal promotion. HR writes a job profile, full with required skills and competencies. The job is posted and candidates apply. HR waits a couple of weeks until there is a good batch. A long list is made, and five candidates are invited for interviews. After a couple of interview rounds, and maybe some assessment or tests, the final candidate is offered the job. She has a notice period of three months, and starts six to nine months after the vacancy appeared.

What are some of the current trends in the area of recruitment and selection?

1. From reactive to proactive

The biggest shift that is slowly going on, is the shift from reactive to proactive recruitment. It requires some level of workforce planning. With the current level of hr analytics it is relatively easy to increase the quality of workforce planning. Who are the people or the kind of people who are most likely to leave in the coming years? What are the capabilities where there is an upward trend in demand? No longer recruit for vacancies, but recruit to strengthen for the capabilities you will need in the future.

2. From recruiting for jobs to recruiting for assignments

Organisations are more creatively using the opportunities of a more flexible workforce. It helps to think less in terms of jobs and more in terms of assignments. There is an assignment to be done, and how can we quickly find the best possible people on the market who can do the assignment? Intermediaries with good knowledge of the market of self-employed professionals can help here. Also more and more online platforms offer services in this domain.

3. From selecting on skills to selecting on values and personality

For their core organisations are looking for talent where there is a good fit between the values and the personality of the organisation and the values and the personality of the candidates. Also organisations have personalities and what you see emerging is methodologies to make the best fit between people and organisations.

4. Gamification in recruitment

The use of gamification in recruitment has been going on for some time. Recruitment can be fun, and people want to work for organisations where work and fun are closely connected.

5. Gamification in selection

Gamification is now entering selection as well. Candidates are asked to play a game (e.g. The Wasabi Waiter) and the companies behind the games claim they can make a valuable profile of the candidate based on his or her game behaviour and results. Playing a game is a lot more fun than being interviewed by people who all ask more or less the same questions (“What are your strong points?”).

6. The end of traineeships

Traineeships are slowly fading away. Planning the careers of people years ahead does not fit in a time where the speed of change is continuously increasing. Also it does not help the business to create a group of people who are pampered during a couple of years and who are kept away from real work. Organisations need streetwise entrepreneurs who have learned to operate close to clients and markets.

7. Community management as a recruitment tool

The practice to create communities around organisations, a kind of “fan clubs”, is growing. The communities are connected to organisations and through the community people can be given a real experience of what it means to be part of an organisation. When opportunities occur, candidates from the communities can very organically become part of the organisation.

Other blog posts on trends in recruitment:

Tom Haak is the founder and director of The HR Trend Institute. Prior to founding the HR Trend Institute in 2014, Tom held senior HR positions in companies as Arcadis, Aon, KPMG and Philips. The HR Trend Institute detects, follows and encourages smart and creative use of trends in the field of people and organizations, and also in adjacent areas.